The devil, they say, has the best tunes, but if that’s the case, we’re all devil-worshippers. There are many tales of musicians who made a pact with the devil in order to acquire their preternatural talents: Paganini and Robert Johnson come to mind. Then there are the musical yarns of players, often fiddlers, who, with varying degrees of success, enter into diabolical competition with the Devil: Charlie Daniels’ The Devil Went Down to Georgia and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale are contrasting examples.
Wynton Marsalis’s A Fiddler’s Tale (dating from 1988) takes several leaves out of Stravinsky’s book. In obvious homage, he uses the same instrumentation and much of the plot structure of The Soldier’s Tale, and like Stravinsky, he uses a spoken narrative to keep the story moving. Traces of Stravinsky continually bubble to the surface – how could they not, with such a characteristically Stravinskyan line-up of violin, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, bassoon, double bass and percussion?
